Movie review: Otherwise strong 'Hitchcock' mangled by added killer

If only director Sacha Gervasi hadn't gotten so clever, he might have had a truly remarkable film with "Hitchcock," starring titans Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Helen Mirren as his spouse and oft collaborator of 60 years, Alma Reville.

After all, the story of Hitchcock's struggle to shoot his landmark 1960 thriller "Psycho" could never be your run-of-the-mill "making of" outing. The tale of challenging cultural norms and dodging Hollywood's Motion Picture Production Code Administration still resonates with issues of graphic violence, voyeurism and ratings.

More vitally, the film reveals a love story few know: the complicated and protean relationship of the great director and his mate.

The richest moments in "Hitchcock" reside in Hitch and Alma's dance of disappointment and jealousy as well as their appreciation of the other's gifts -- all of which reach a fever pitch as Hitchcock undertakes a movie his studio (Paramount) had no interest in making, let alone releasing. Hitchcock self-financed the film. While the director had achieved box-office success, especially with his darkly wry and romantic suspense thriller "North by Northwest," this murderous project proved a great financial and creative risk for him as well as Alma.

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There is no shortage of angles. And once the "Psycho" production and shoot get underway with Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh , James D'Arcy as a nervous, likely closeted actor named Anthony Perkins and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, who played poor Marion Crane's tenacious sis, the juggling of the domestic and professional is even more demanding.

Yet Gervasi, who made the lauded head-banger documentary "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," could not leave well enough alone. Instead he attempted to match the Master of Suspense's serrated humor by giving killer Ed Gein more than a cameo role.

Yes, the Wisconsin killer was the inspiration for novelist Robert Bloch's now indelible psychopath Norman Bates. But having him hovering from time to time like Hitchcock's dark passenger, offering nasty bits of advice, is nearly ludicrous. More troubling, it introduces the issue of real crime versus imagined horror without any intention of truly taking it on.

Granted, it is amusing to find Hannibal Lecter and Gein, an inspiration for "Silence of the Lambs" serial killer Buffalo Bill, hanging about in the same frame. But it's really just a device, and one that detracts more than it adds to our understanding of genius.

Hopkins' and Mirren's Hitch and Alma are the grand draws here. Mirren has the slightly easier task of breathing life into a person most in the audience do not know. Her portrayal of Alma's on-again, off-again tango with writer Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) shows a creative woman trying to stand apart from an impossibly dynamic collaboration and an at times profoundly frustrating marriage.

Hopkins is more corseted by history and by his character's onscreen persona made so amusingly vivid by his role as host to the TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

It's tough work giving good face to an iconic role, yet Johansson manages to show Leigh as a thoughtful professional aware of the interpersonal booby-traps set by her director for his leading ladies.

"Hitchcock" handles the infamous shower scene so much better than the artistically bizarre, shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho" made by Gus Van Sant in 1998. But nothing comes close to the masters' shattering choreography of vicious knife slashes and brilliant editing cuts, silent screaming and Bernard Herrmann's violent violins.